Contains the current reading offering and my opinion - such as it is.
Seeing as I recently hit American Literature AND Great Books 1 through Griffith Uni, my offerings right now are a bit on the dry side.
For AmLit the list went (in order of reading) Daisy Miller, Tender is the Night, Ceremony, Animal Dreams, Libra, Jazz, and Day of the Locusts.
For Great Books 1 we were looking at The Odyssey, Macbeth, Gullivers Travels, The Canterbury Tales, and Beowulf.
Ya, that's some heavy reading! To try to cut down on space I'm going to do some grouping (much like Uni's do, just to make our minds bend). First up we'll do Daisy Miller and Tender is the Night which were written by Henry James and F.Scott Fitzgerald respectivly.
It should be known that American Literature isn't really my area. I'm a fantasy reader my nature with some wild history thrown in so these two presented a bit of a challenge for me. They were both written by Ex-pat Americans who lived in Europe and for the laymen, it seemed like they spent a lot of time feeling kinda sorry for themselves. My main comment to my friends while working through these two was 'waaa I'm American and the Europeans don't like me waaa'. This was probably quite unfair, but I was feeling pretty sorry for myself at the time. You try reading 12 heavy books in 13 weeks.
So, in fairness, Daisy Miller, while very short is deceptively heavy and by the end almost unbearably depressing. Be ready, everything sucks for everyone in the end. Not that Tender is the Night was much better. Both books take a lot out of you and lean very heavily on the theme of right action (or not as the case usually seems to be) and then the ramifications of such. The gentle of spirit might need some klenex, it's all a bit emotional. My assessment for these two wasn't really hot, so I'm not including it. It wouldn't help anyone anyway.
The second grouping was Ceremony and Animal Dreams by Lesley Marmon Silko and Barbra Kingsolver respectively. I enjoyed these a bit more but that's purely a personal thing. Ceremony will tkae it out of you, so be prepared to work for your edification, Silko's going to put you through the ringer on this one. Her protagonist has a pretty sketchy grip on time and space, which is problematic when the fate of the land, possibly humanity even, rests squarly on his shoulders. Both books are thick with Indian (native American Indian, not subcontinent Indian) culture, but this one will bend the western mind a bit because that culture is SO forward in everything from the names used to the style of writing! Animal Dreams covers pretty much the same themes but you're going to find it much gentler on the poor western brain. The plot goes from beginning to end in a more or less constant time stream, which is nice when you're a student and haven't slept for three weeks. Your hero here is a woman named Cody, you'll probably change your mind a couple of times about whether you like her or not - but then that's half the point.
My assessment for this sucker scored me a High Distinction, so I'll be posting it later for what it's worth.
In the last AmLit block we have Libra, Jazz, and Day of the Locust. These were offered up by Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison and somebody called 'West' respectively. Libra was actually pretty cool from a history buff's point of view. It follows Lee Harvey Oswald from childhood through to that famous moment many years later when he shot JFK and secured his place in history forever. It's pretty complicated with some dissying perspective shifts, but stick with it, the pay off is pretty good.
Jazz was not my idea of great reading, but a lot of that stems from the fact that I'm a moralist really and I like my literature to elevate man above his own BS... Jazz doesn't do that really. The killed doesn't go to jail (he isn't even kneecapped by a pissed off daddy) and I couldn't help but feel like the entire thing was a justification for cold, selfish murder. But some people like that kind of thing. Day of the Locust is pretty dizzying in it's unexplained (or at least wildly uncool and completely unresolved) violence. It's as close as you're going to get to the quintisential mind f^ck.
I dunno about my marks for this guy yet... I'll do a rewrite of my exam piece if the mark turns out to be OK - if not, eh.
On to Great Books 1 which, like Great Books 2 (which I did first, go me) was all about appreciating (if not understanding) the classics. I hear a lot of pissed off carping from lit teachers that students don't know good literature when it bites them in the ass. I think this is a stupid thing to say, you can like whatever you want - you just have to accept that what you like has no bearing at all on what they're going to give you to study. Most people don't really like canibals either, but you study them anyway - try to think of it like that. It doesn't help, but try anyway.
So, Great Books. The Odyssey that we were given was written in prose, not verse, which was really weird for me I have to admit. It's a bit poem, reading it without rhyme felt like a cop-out on the part of the translator but it DID pull the story together a bit better as you can imagine. Between that, Macbeth and Gullivers Travels I don't really think there is much point rehashing... if you haven't read them you're probably not going too do so by choice. The Canterbury Tales are mostly pure filth, Chaucer was a dirty dirty man, there is also a lot in there on women (towards whom he is in no way biased, in fact that's sort of his point) if you care do do some evaluation. I've got an HD assessment on the subject which I'll put up when I'm done here. As for Beowulf... if you can't read it in the old tongue, you aren't going to get a lot out of it. Whatever you do, do NOT watch any movie with that name and think you know the story - you'll fail your course SO bad, you wont know what happend. 'based on' translates into 'I stole the names cuz they sounded neat' not 'you dont have to read some stuffy old book in bland meter, watch this instead'. Please, trust me on this.
That's all my Lit offerings for a while. I'm doing history subjects this SP and I think I want to take a break from bashing my head against the unyeilding wall of 'classics' my lecturers all want to rave about.
